Artists Past and Present; Random Studies

by Elisabeth Luther Cary

Franz von Stuck is Boecklin's most distinguished follower. When we turn from the examples of Boecklin's work, by no means the most impressive examples, exhibited in America, to Stuck's "Inferno" we perceive both the influence of Boecklin and the powerful individuality that mingles with it.

There is Boecklin's insistence upon the symbol, and upon the bodying forth of things unseen, there is the solid violence of color, there is the pompous statement of the half-discerned truths which more sensitive artists are content to whisper. But there is also a splendid arabesque of line and a deeper reading of the spiritual content of the subject.

If we compare Stuck with William Blake whose fancy also was haunted by Dantesque conceptions, we see how much more impressive Blake's visions of the unreal world are and we find the reason in their swift energy of conception and in the artist's tenacity in holding his conception. With both Boecklin and Stuck we feel that the manner of rendering the conception becomes more important than the initial conception, and this seldom, if ever, is true of Blake. In spite of Boecklin's superb restraint in the disposition of his masses, when it comes to color he is at the mercy of the material pigment and permits it to obliterate where it should enhance and reveal. His forms, also, and even more than Stuck's, lose vitality under the weight of significance forced upon them, while Blake's emerge from the blank panel clean and strong and unencumbered. We feel that Blake, with all his struggle to utter truth by means of symbol, never allows his mind to lose the idea that "Living form is eternal existence," but in Boecklin's pictures "living form" is often buried beneath his colored clays.

Thus we see that it cannot truly be said of him and his followers that the idea is of first importance to them. It is their material that is of first importance, otherwise they would learn so to subordinate their material as to support and disclose their idea. This is the more obvious that their idea is emotional and therefore perfectly suited to expression through the medium of art. Liebermann's ideas although they are intellectual are not of a kind that cannot appropriately be translated into pictures, and his respect for them leads him to fit his manner of expression closely to their requirements. Like Leibl he is a painter and a thinker in one, and the faculties of the two work in complete coordination.

Painters of Boecklin's type, on the other hand, wish to produce in the observer a strong emotion, but they become slaves to their medium because their own emotion is not sufficiently powerful to conquer their minds, which become diverted by the colors and forms they produce. One of Blake's swift upward soaring lines has more power to carry the imagination heavenward than all the versions of Boecklin's "Island of Death."

Against Boecklin's followers, whose minds are more or less befogged by their lack of appreciation of paint as a means to an end, we must place Wilhelm Truebner who is a clear thinker and a great painter, with more warmth than Liebermann and with a reticent color sense, a feeling for expressive form, a love of reality, and no apparent desire to re-invent the grotesque. His elegance of line in itself sets him apart from most of his compatriots, and his knowledge of how to extract from his color scheme its essential beauty is greater than that of most modern painters, whatever their nationality. His blacks have the depth and luster without unctiousness characteristic of black as the great colorists use it, and in his touches of pale refined color enlivening a black and white composition, we have the delightful effect so often given by Manet, as of a bunch of bright flowers thrown into a shadowy corner.

If young Germany were content to follow in Truebner's footsteps we should soon have a revival of the ancient craftsmanship and conscience that animated Holbein and Dürer. Young Germany, however, has other plans. To learn of them the reader is referred to Meier-Graefe's comprehensive and stimulating volume on modern art. The only representation of the painters of the immediate present given in the American exhibition was confined to the Scholle School, which, however, indicates clearly the creative impulse that is stirring in the younger painters. "A warlike state," Blake wrote, "never can produce Art. It will Rob and Plunder and accumulate into one place and Translate and Copy and Buy and Sell and Criticize, but not Make." This has been true of the Germans, but the present generation is bent upon making and it is natural that the strongest impulse toward originality should come to the Munich painters rather than to the cosmopolitan Berlin men.

The Scholle is a Munich association consisting of a group of young men who, taking the humble and fecund earth as their symbol, as the title of the society implies, seek to get into their painting the vigor and intensity of life and force which devotion to the healthy joys provided by our mother Earth is supposed to engender.

They are like the giant Antaeus whose strength was invincible so long as he remained in contact with the earth, but who easily was strangled when lifted into the upper air. Their strength also melts into helplessness when confronted by problems of atmosphere and the delicate veils of tone which enwrap the material world for the American painter.

But the energy of these young Germans in their own field is something at which to wonder. They remind one of their critics of a band of lusty peasant boys journeying in rank from their University to the nearest beer garden, singing loud songs by the way. Leo Putz, Adolf Muenzer, Fritz Erler, are the leaders of the group, although Alex Salzmann and Ferdinand Spiegel were Erler's collaborators in the famous Wiesbaden frescoes which offended the taste of the Kaiser. These young men are entirely capable of offending a less conventional taste than the Kaiser's, but they all are doing something which has not been done in Germany for many a long year; they are busying themselves with the visible world and painting frankly what they see. It does not matter in the least that in their decorative work they give rein to their fancy and produce such symbolism as we find in Erler's "Pestilence," or that in the illustrations for Jugend they tell a story with keen appreciation of its literary significance. Their eyes are open upon the aspect of material things and they paint flesh that is palpitating with life, forms that live and move, and color that vibrates.